1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of computer telephony integration (CTI) systems, and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for selecting a dialing strategy for placing an outbound call.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of CTI telephony, contact centers are leveraged by enterprises to provide services like sales, customer service, and the like to enterprise customers who may call into the contact center to receive such services. Most contact centers employ agents to work live interactions and to perform other communications-oriented tasks. Incoming calls are typically intercepted by an interactive voice response (IVR) unit and are routed internally according to nature of and intent of the call.
Agents may be organized into agent groups having differing skill sets or departments and calls are routed to these agents based on availability, among other factors that might come into play. Agents typically operate a computer connected to a local area network (LAN) and an agent telephone when answering live voice interactions.
Contact centers often employ proactive tactics to provide business revenue and to fully employ agent employees. One of these tactics is an outbound calling campaign. An outbound calling campaign makes use of contact information known to or otherwise made available to the contact center for the purposes of automatically dialing out to individual contacts, and if calls are answered, connecting the calls to agents to accomplish a purpose of the campaign, such as sales. Such a calling campaign often employs an automated dialing system that dials numbers from a list of contact records or calling list.
One drawback with standard outbound calling campaigns is that campaign settings established, such as dialing strategy, dialing application, and other settings are configured at campaign level and affect every outbound call made during a same campaign. In order to treat contacts differently using different dialing strategies, dialing modes, and other settings, the contacts have to be sorted accordingly for multiple campaigns where the settings are different for each different campaign. The campaign level settings still apply to all outbound calls made under that campaign.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for selecting dialing strategies and other campaign settings on a call-by-call basis. A system such as this would provide flexibility to exploit different attributes of different contacts, where such exploitation may increase probability of successful call resolution and potentially increase campaign revenues.